Farewell to the master

After a long life and a marvelous career, Ray Harryhausen has passed on to whatever awaits us in the next phase of existence.

He was one of my heroes when I was growing up, and even in this CGI age, I still enjoy his hand-crafted special effects. The list of his creations is amazing: the savage Cyclops on the cloud-shrouded island of Colossa, the reptilian Ymir captured on Venus, an army of living skeletons, a six-armed goddess statue brought to life, a ship's figurehead that tears itself loose from the prow, a beast from 20,000 fathoms, a giant crab, the Selenites in their underground lunar colony, a young allosaurus that raids a prehistoric village, Gwangi the Great, Mighty Joe Young, the gorgon Medusa with her head of living snakes, Pegasus, the bronze giant Talos, the seven-headed Hydra, the pterodactyl that carries off a screaming Raquel Welch and nearly feeds her to its nestlings, a bevy of flying saucers that lay waste to our nation's capitol, and many others - all brought to the screen one frame at a time.

Here's a look at the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. In an era when the typical movie monsters were magnified lizards and men in rubber suits, Harryhausen gave us sights no one had seen before.

Comments

I was a kid in the Sixties and early Seventies Michael and the weird thing about Ray Harryhausen is in an age when there was no internet and fanzines even among the tiny coterie aware they existed were viewed as on a par with paedo mags yet every Scouse kid I knew'd heard of him and you only had to mention one of his films was on at that moment for the whole neighbourhood to immediately empty girls included!